Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and the Barrie Cooke archive

A unique literary and artistic archive acquired by Pembroke College Cambridge transforms our understanding of the great poets #TedHughes and #SeamusHeaney. It reveals that they drew career-defining inspiration from a virtually unknown friendship circle, and a shared passion for water and fishing, spanning five decades.

The collection is a treasure trove of previously unseen poems, personal letters, photographs and literary papers by the writers, and drawings and paintings of their work by their artist friend Barrie Cooke. In this film, Dr Mark Wormald, an English Fellow at Pembroke College, reveals some of the archive’s treasures and explains its exciting cultural significance.

Read more here: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/big-fish-hughes-heaney-cooke

Mark Wormald co-edited Ted Hughes from Cambridge to Collected (2013) and Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture (2018). His book The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes is due in 2021, and he is working on a study of Cooke and his friends, entitled Casting and Gathering: A Painter and Two Poets.

Pembroke College acquired the archive from the Cooke Estate with the generous support of Ted Hughes’s sister Olwyn’s bequest to Pembroke; it was purchased with support from the Arts Council England/ V&A Purchase Grant Fund, the National Heritage Memorial Fund, Art Fund, Friends of the National Libraries, Old Possum’s Practical Trust, and the Duke of Devonshire’s Charitable Trust as well as from alumni and friends of the College.